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5000 years of science development in India is being shown in an exhibition in London, UK

First written zero on a 1700-year-old birch bark manuscript

Oldest artefact is set of weights that standardised mud brick production

Exhibition at UK’s Science Museum in London

A light scattering technique invented in the early 20th century and a fragile manuscript documenting the earliest known symbol for a numerical zero are among achievements of Indian science highlighted in an exhibition that opened this week at the Science Museum in London, UK.

Illuminating India, which runs until 31 March 2018, marks 70 years from the country’s independence by celebrating global contributions to scientific advancement, as well as photography, from 3000 BC to the present day.

Mainstream views of science and technology tend to be Eurocentric, according to the curator, and the aim of the exhibition is to “redress that balance” by bringing India’s contribution to the centre.

He pointed to a set of standardised weights, the oldest artefact on display, as an example of how early scientific thought made it possible – through the production of mud bricks of standardized sizes – for the Indus Valley Civilisation to build large cities comparable to those later built by the Romans.

The scientific achievements on show range from space exploration – through early astronomy and India’s modern space programme – to the Great Trigonometrical Survey that mapped the subcontinent in the nineteenth century, and to the study of nature through technology such as Raman spectrometry, a light-scattering technique still used today to analyse the make-up of different materials.

WHEN researchers collected honey samples from around the world, they found that three-quarters of them had a common type of pesticide suspected of playing a role in the decline of bees.

Even honey from the island paradise of Tahiti had the chemical.

That demonstrates how pervasive a problem the much-debated pesticide is for honeybees, said authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

They said it is not a health problem for people because levels were far below governments’ thresholds on what’s safe to eat.

“What this shows is the magnitude of the contamination,” said study lead author Edward Mitchell, a biology professor at the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, adding that there are “relatively few places where we did not find any”.

Over the past few years, several studies — in the lab and the field — link insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics, to reduced and weakened honeybee hives, although pesticide makers dispute those studies.

Neonics work by attacking an insect’s central nervous system; bees and other pollinators have been on the decline for more than a decade and experts blame a combination of factors: neonics, parasites, disease, climate change and lack of a diverse food supply.

Three scientists who laid the groundwork for the first direct detection of gravitational waves have won the Nobel Prize in physics. Rainer Weiss of MIT, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of Caltech, will share the 9-million-Swedish-kronor (about $1.1 million) prize, with half going to Weiss and the remainder split between Thorne and Barish.

Weiss, Thorne and Barish are pioneers of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, or LIGO. On February 11, 2016, LIGO scientists announced they had spotted gravitational waves produced by a pair of merging black holes. This first-ever detection generated a frenzy of excitement among physicists and garnered front-page headlines around the world.

An imaging technique that freezes tiny biological objects such as proteins and viruses in place so that scientists can peer into their structures at the scale of atoms has won its developers the 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Jacques Dubochet of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joachim Frank of Columbia University and Richard Henderson of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, won for their contributions to the development of the technique, called cryo-electron microscopy, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 4.

Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young are the joint winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, winning for their discoveries about how internal clocks and biological rhythms govern human life.

The three Americans won "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm," the Nobel Foundation says

"Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year's Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm. They showed that this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day. Subsequently, they identified additional protein components of this machinery, exposing the mechanism governing the self-sustaining clockwork inside the cell. We now recognize that biological clocks function by the same principles in cells of other multicellular organisms, including humans.

A team in China has taken a new approach to fixing disease genes in human embryos. The researchers created cloned embryos with a genetic mutation for a potentially fatal blood disorder, and then precisely corrected the DNA to show how the condition might be prevented at the earliest stages of development.

The report, published on 23 September in Protein & Cell, is the latest in a series of experiments to edit genes in human embryos. And it employs an impressive series of innovations, scientists say. Rather than replacing entire sections of genes, the team, led by Junjiu Huang at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, tweaked individual DNA letters, or bases, using a precision gene-editing technology developed in the United States.

Quantum video chat links scientists

Ultrasecure quantum video chats are now possible across the globe.

In a demonstration of the world’s first intercontinental quantum link, scientists held a long-distance videoconference on September 29 between Austria and China. To secure the communication, a Chinese satellite distributed a quantum key, a secret string of numbers used to encrypt the video transmission so that no one could eavesdrop on the conversation. In the call, chemist Chunli Bai, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, spoke with quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

“It’s a huge achievement,” says quantum physicist Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Canada, who was not involved with the project. “It’s a major step to show that this approach could be viable.”

Using a technique known as quantum key distribution, scientists share secret strings of numbers while ensuring that no eavesdroppers can intercept the code undetected. Those quantum keys are then used to encrypt information sent via traditional internet connections. Decoding the transmission requires the same key used for encryption, foiling would-be snoops.

Tropical forests have flipped from sponges to sources of carbon dioxide

The world’s tropical forests are exhaling — and it’s not a sigh of relief. Instead of soaking up climate-warming gases on balance, these so-called “lungs of the planet” are beginning to release them.

A new study based on analyses of satellite imagery of tropical Asia, Africa and the Americas suggests that tropical forests contribute more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than they remove. Much of that carbon contribution is due to deforestation, the conversion of forests to urban spaces such as farms or roads. But more than two-thirds comes from a less visible source: a decline in the number and diversity of trees in remaining forests, researchers report online September 28 in Science.

Intact forests can be degraded or disturbed by selective logging, environmental change, wildfires or disease.

In total, the researchers found, tropical forests emit 862 teragrams of carbon to the atmosphere annually — more than all cars in the United States did in 2015 — and absorb only 436 teragrams of carbon each year. Of that net loss of carbon to the atmosphere, 69 percent is from degraded forests and the rest from deforestation.

Some 60 percent of those carbon emissions came from tropical America, including the Amazon Basin. Africa’s tropical forests were responsible for about 24 percent of the carbon loss, and Asia’s forests for 16 percent.

The results are a wake-up call that there is an opportunity for improvement.

Climate change threatens 33% of all parasites. Good news? Bad news, according to scientists! Read why...

Because parasites play an important part in our Eco-system!

The study published in the journal Science Advances was completed with the help of the U.S. National Parasite Collection, as well as specialized databases of ticks, fleas, bee mites, and feather mites. What's more, 17 researchers from eight countries spent years tracking down different parasite specimens in order to understand the species' habitat and needs.

By using climate forecasts to determine how the 457 parasite species will react to the changing climate, researchers found they are evidently among the most threatened life forms on Earth with regards to climate change, even more so than their hosts. In fact, models show that about a third of parasites could go extinct by 2070 from the effects of habitat loss alone, with the more conservative models showing instead a 5 to 10 percent loss.

Why is it bad?

Parasites don't often good reputations as they are often responsible for diseases and infections. By definition, parasites are organisms that live and thrive at the expense of its host. But did you know that they are also important members of the ecosystem?

As small as they are and despite their negative reputations, parasites actually contribute to keeping wildlife populations in check, and in providing a large percentage of food chain links. Many parasites have complex life cycles that require being passed from one host to another. Because of this, having strong populations of parasites are often indicators of a healthy ecosystem.

"It means the system has a diversity of animals in it and that conditions have been consistent long enough for these complex associations to develop," said Anna J. Phillips of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. What's more, a wide range of parasites in an ecosystem means that they could compete with one another, therefore slowing down the spread of diseases. Without them, the ecosystem could be seriously affected.

Unfortunately, because of their bad reputation, they are often overlooked in studies regarding climate change and its impacts. It is only now that we see that they, too, are affected by the climate change. Because of the current study, scientists can look further into the implications of changing parasite populations. This is especially important as it could also lead to the thriving of other, possibly more invasive parasites as a result of the lack of competition.